Two Fronts (7 page)

“
Gruk! Gruk! Gruk!
” It was only a raven, flying along looking for dead soldiers who hadn’t got buried yet. All the Soviet soldiers aimed their weapons at it, then sheepishly lowered them once more.

Sasha shook his head. “Anything moves, anything makes a noise, I want to kill it. If I live through the stinking war, I’ll be ruined as a civilian. Any time somebody drops a plate, I’ll dive under the table.”

He must’ve had a wide streak of that before the war started. He wouldn’t have made such a good point man if he hadn’t. “You
don’t
shoot any fucking thing that moves, you
don’t
dive for cover when anybody farts, you won’t need to worry about living through this cunt of a war,” Kuchkov said. He was surprised he’d lasted as long as he had.

They tramped on. It started to snow, which cut visibility. Kuchkov hung on tight to his submachine gun. If they stumbled over the Nazis, he’d need to spray death around as fast as he could. The rest of the guys in the patrol, except for Davidov, carried rifles. A rifle could kill people out much farther than a PPD could. But so what, when you had to trip over the Hitlerites before you know they were there?

The wind blew harder. The noise it made would also mask approaching enemies. Ivan had to remind himself it would also mask his approach from the Germans.

Sasha Davidov suddenly stopped short. He waved one mittened hand behind him, so no one in the direction he was going could see the motion. Then he flattened out in the snow.

Kuchkov flopped down, too. He was on his belly before he had any notion how he’d got there. The other Red Army men went down, too. They might have been a fraction slower, but no more than a fraction. The really slow fools, the really stupid ones, died fast. Kuchkov had never heard of Charles Darwin, which didn’t mean natural selection failed to operate on the battlefield.

For several breaths, Kuchkov saw nothing through the swirling snow. Was Sasha imagining shit again? Every so often, he did. It was the price you paid for having somebody out front who wouldn’t miss any of the trouble that really was there.

But no. It wasn’t imaginary this time. Out of the snow came a Nazi patrol. They were close enough that Kuchkov had no doubt who they were. Their helmets might be whitewashed, but no one would ever mistake one of those coal scuttles for a Red Army pot. The Fritzes even walked differently from Russians. Ivan couldn’t have said how, but they did.

The wind blew their words his way. German was just ugly noise to him. The Russian word for Germans,
Nemtsi
, meant something like
babblers
. But their tone was the same as his would have been: halfway between resigned and nervous. They peered around, looking for Red Army men … but not spotting any.

Pilots always said the trick in aerial combat was getting close before you opened up. Then you couldn’t miss, and the other bastard never had a prayer. It didn’t always work like that on the ground. You had to respect machine guns. Try and close with them and you’d end up dinner for crows and foxes. Here, though …

Kuchkov’s PPD already pointed in the right direction. He squeezed off a short burst, then another and another. The PPD pulled high and to the right if you just let it rip. The other Russian soldiers opened up, too.

Down went the Fritzes, tumbling like ninepins. Their dying shrieks rang through the stuttering thunder of gunfire. One of the Germans wasn’t dead, though. He’d lain down in the snow and was shooting back. Finely machined Schmeissers didn’t always like the cold. They’d freeze up when a German needed them most. Not this one, though. Maybe the guy used Russian gun oil.

Whatever he used, it didn’t help him long. The Red Army soldiers spread out and went after him, staying as low as they could. He soon lay bleeding and lifeless like his buddies.

Sasha looked worriedly toward the west. Would the racket from the firefight draw more Nazis? Kuchkov was worried about that, too, but he also had other things on his mind. He bent down by a dead Fritz and fumbled through his belt pouches. “Fuck me!” he said in delight. The German had not one, not two, but three tinfoil tubes of liver paste—the best damn ration anybody’s army issued. Kuchkov shoved them into a greatcoat pocket. The other Russians plundered the rest of the corpses. Then the patrol moved out again.

ANASTAS MOURADIAN AND ISA MOGAMEDOV
eyed each other in what would have been loathing if they’d had the nerve to show it. “Well, well,” Mouradian said in Russian. “Someone in the personnel office is having a little joke on us.”

“Very likely, Comrade Pilot,” his new copilot and bomb-aimer agreed in the same language. “Or else a sergeant with too much to do grabbed the first cards that came up … and here we are.”

“Here we are, all right,” Stas agreed dryly. Speaking Russian helped ease things a little. It was also the only language an Armenian and an Azeri were likely to have in common.

Armenians had lived in Armenia forever, or as near as made no difference. Azeris had lived next door to them—and occasionally (or sometimes not so occasionally) tried to overrun them—for the past 900 years or so. They used different tongues. They followed different faiths. Given a choice, Mouradian and Mogamedov would either have icily ignored each other or gone for each other’s throats.

They got no choice. Brute Soviet force overrode their petty nationalisms, their different religions, their different tongues. They would work together—or the KGB would make them both sorrier than either could hope to make the other. That wasn’t exactly the way Stalin’s New Soviet Men were supposed to be forged, which wasn’t to say it didn’t work.

Of course, Stalin was a Georgian. Beria, who ran the KGB, was a Mingrelian. They both sprang from the Caucasus themselves. They understood the local feuds as no Russians—onlookers from outside—could ever hope to do. They understood the force required to supersede them. They understood … and they used it.

If a Red Air Force Pe-2 had an Armenian in one cockpit chair and an Azeri in the other, their superiors might indeed think it was funny, but wouldn’t care past that—unless the two men in the cockpit showed they couldn’t fight the Nazis. That, their superiors would care about. And Mouradian and Mogamedov would both regret making them care.

Business, then. In the air, they would have to try to keep each other (and their bombardier, a bad-tempered Russian sergeant named Fyodor Mechnikov) alive. On the ground … On the ground, Stas intended to have as little to do with his new crewman as he could.

“How much experience in the plane have you had?” he asked now.

“Fifteen missions,” Mogamedov answered. “A 109 shot us down. I managed to get out. My pilot stopped a 20mm with his face.”

“Something like that happened to me, too, when I was in an old SB-2,” Mouradian said. “I’m surprised they didn’t give you a plane of your own.”

The other flyer shrugged. He was a little swarthier than Mouradian, his eyes a little narrower. To a Russian, all men from the Caucasus looked alike: in their charming way, the Russians labeled them black-asses. Men who were from the Caucasus knew better, not that Russians bothered to listen to them. “They put me in with you instead, Comrade Pilot,” Mogamedov said, and not another word.

More words would have been wasted anyhow. Mouradian did waste a few: “We’ll do our damnedest to give the Nazis grief, then.” He wanted to sound loyal—and to be heard to sound loyal.

“
Da
,” Mogamedov agreed. Mouradian needed a new copilot because his old one, Ivan Kulkaanen, had been rash enough to intimate that the USSR wasn’t running the war so well as it might have. He’d tried to run when the Chekists came after him. He was a Karelian. He knew everything there was to know about snow. The secret police hunted him down anyway.

Right now, the new Caucasian cockpit crew wasn’t going anywhere. Snow blanketed the airstrip. The clouds that dropped it weren’t much higher than the treetops. Flying would have been suicidal. Such details didn’t always stop the men with the fancy rank marks on their sleeves. Today, they sufficed.

Mouradian got a glass of tea and some bread and sausage in the officers’ tent the next morning. When a bottle came along, he swigged before he passed it. He didn’t drink like a Russian—he had but one liver to give for his country—but he drank. In weather like this, vodka made good antifreeze. It also helped you not notice the long, dull hours crawling by.

Lieutenant Mogamedov ducked into the tent not long after he did. The Azeri made a beeline for the samovar. As he gulped hot, sweet tea, he shivered theatrically. “Cold out there!”

Azeri and Armenian
could
agree on something. The Russian and Ukrainian flyers who made up the majority only hooted at a southerner’s discomfort. They started telling stories about really cold weather. Stas had flown against the Japanese in Siberia. He’d been through plenty worse than this himself. That didn’t mean he enjoyed it.

Mogamedov tore at the coarse black bread with his teeth. He ignored the sausage. Stas realized after a minute that the cheap, fatty stuff was bound to be mostly pork. His new copilot didn’t drink any of the free-flowing vodka, either.

That was interesting. Mogamedov might not be a pious Muslim—you couldn’t very well be a pious anything and a New Soviet Man at the same time—but he didn’t go out of the way to flout the tenets of his ancestral faith.

If I want to, chances are I can use that against him
, Stas thought. All he had to do was whisper in an informer’s ear, and Mogamedov would find Chekists crawling over him like lice. And all Stas had to do after that was look at himself in the mirror for the rest of his life.

One of his bristly eyebrows quirked. If only he didn’t despise people who did such things. But he did. He knew exactly what he thought of people who sold out their friends and neighbors and acquaintances so they could move up themselves. No Russian, not even the filthiest mat, could describe the blackness of such treachery. For that, you needed Armenian.

Proof of how strongly he felt about it was that he wouldn’t give an Azeri to the KGB. If Mogamedov did himself in by avoiding pork and alcohol, then he did. Stas wouldn’t be especially sorry. But he wouldn’t grease the skids—even with lard.

That thought, perhaps aided by the vodka he’d knocked back, made him chuckle to himself. Isa Mogamedov noticed. Unlike most of the men eating breakfast, he wasn’t drinking part of it, so he noticed things they might have missed. “What’s funny, Comrade Pilot?”

“I was just remembering a joke somebody told me,” Mouradian answered—a lie, but a polite lie.

But the Russian sitting next to him gave him a nudge and said, “Well, tell it, then. I could use a laugh.” By his slurred speech, he’d drunk more of his breakfast than Stas had.

Mouradian couldn’t even shoot him a resentful look. Mogamedov might notice that, too. Instead, he really had to remember a joke, and he had to come out with it. He chose a long, complicated story about a pretty girl in Moscow who wanted to record a message for her grandmother in far-off Irkutsk but couldn’t afford it, and about the lecherous fellow who ran the recording shop and saw a chance to take it out in trade. “So there she is, on her knees in front of him, holding it”—Stas illustrated with appropriate lewd gestures—“and he says, ‘Well? Go ahead!’ And she leans forward, and she says, ‘Hello? Granny?’ ”

The Russian officer bellowed laughter. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. “That’s good!
Bozhemoi
, that’s good!” he spluttered, and laughed some more.

Mogamedov laughed, too, even if not quite so much. Everybody who’d listened laughed. You couldn’t hear that joke without laughing—at least, Stas had never run into anybody who could.

Another vodka bottle came around. He swigged from it. No, vodka wasn’t against his religion, even if he’d drunk wine more often before the Red Air Force pulled him out of Armenia. Wine tasted good, too. As far as he could see, vodka had only one purpose: knocking you on your ass. The stuff was damn good at it, too. He offered the bottle to the Russian who’d made him come up with the joke.

That worthy poured it down as if he never expected to see any more. He almost emptied the bottle. The guy beside him did kill it. Others were going round, though. Before long, one got to Isa Mogamedov. Polite as a cat, he passed it on. “More for the rest of us!” said the Russian he gave it to. That got almost as big a laugh as Stas’ joke.

THEO HOSSBACH WAS
a curiosity in the
Wehrmacht:
a panzer radioman who didn’t like to talk. He doled out words as if somebody were charging him a half a Reichsmark for each and every one. The radioman in a Panzer III sat next to the driver, and also handled the bow machine gun. Theo’d liked his place in the old Panzer II better. He’d been in back of the turret, and most of the time nobody bothered him at all.

Only one problem there: the Panzer II was well on the way from obsolescent to obsolete. Its armor was useless against anything more than small-arms fire, while its 20mm main armament could pop away from now till doomsday without doing anything a KV-1 or a T-34 would notice. Panzer IIs soldiered on in the east. They still made decent reconnaissance vehicles—they could go places armored cars couldn’t—but they weren’t fighting panzers any more.